I was advised that the articles I first posted here on Less Wrong were too long, wide-ranging, and technical, so with this article, I’m trying a more scaled-back, focused, ‘reveal culture’ style. Does it work better than the approach in the article below?
This is better but it still contains two separate ideas. One idea is “I don’t really believe that black holes exist because I think that theorists got drunk on general relativity and invented them.” The other idea has to do with the creation of this specific image.
I agree with korin43 that the second idea already “feels like too much of a personal attack on a particular scientist”. However, if you really want to continue in that direction then you should read all of the relevant scientific papers, write a post (or posts) explaining exactly, in mathematical terms[1] how the algorithms work and then explain the error in careful unambiguous mathematical terms. Strip out everything else[2]. Less Wrong is read by theoretical physicists, quantitative hedge fund managers, specialists in machine learning, and so on. We can handle the math. We do not have time for unnecessary words.
I think it would be more constructive to go in the direction of “black holes do not exist”. The problem is not that your articles are too technical. The problem is that they depend unnecessarily upon deep technical knowledge from unrelated domains. An article explaining why black holes do not exist would require technical knowledge in only a single domain.
In your comments and articles, you often speculate on the motives and thought processes of people you disagree with. I think your writing would benefit from leaving this out and sticking to the facts. Instead of arguing “[person] p who expouses [popular idea] x is wrong because y”, your writing would improve if you wrote “[unpopular idea] x is right because y”.
I would add that an article showing problems with either CLEAN or CHIRP would be interesting (especially if you can demonstrate them by actually running the algorithm, or point at other people’s results doing that), but an article about both at the same time is needlessly complex.
This is better but it still contains two separate ideas. One idea is “I don’t really believe that black holes exist because I think that theorists got drunk on general relativity and invented them.” The other idea has to do with the creation of this specific image.
I agree with korin43 that the second idea already “feels like too much of a personal attack on a particular scientist”. However, if you really want to continue in that direction then you should read all of the relevant scientific papers, write a post (or posts) explaining exactly, in mathematical terms[1] how the algorithms work and then explain the error in careful unambiguous mathematical terms. Strip out everything else[2]. Less Wrong is read by theoretical physicists, quantitative hedge fund managers, specialists in machine learning, and so on. We can handle the math. We do not have time for unnecessary words.
I think it would be more constructive to go in the direction of “black holes do not exist”. The problem is not that your articles are too technical. The problem is that they depend unnecessarily upon deep technical knowledge from unrelated domains. An article explaining why black holes do not exist would require technical knowledge in only a single domain.
Less Wrong supports MathJax.
In your comments and articles, you often speculate on the motives and thought processes of people you disagree with. I think your writing would benefit from leaving this out and sticking to the facts. Instead of arguing “[person] p who expouses [popular idea] x is wrong because y”, your writing would improve if you wrote “[unpopular idea] x is right because y”.
I would add that an article showing problems with either CLEAN or CHIRP would be interesting (especially if you can demonstrate them by actually running the algorithm, or point at other people’s results doing that), but an article about both at the same time is needlessly complex.